A good level of accuracy is relative to what skill bracket you’re in. As a new player in fps, 25% accuracy is kind of expected. Hell, my initial accuracy was around 24.5% because I hadn’t touched a competitive shooter in years. (Cumulatively, I’m at 26.3%, my smurf (made it to check accuracy) is at 33%.) The “average” player is probably around 28-32% accuracy. The guys who PUG and play in cups (or have 6,000 hours in TF2) are in the 35-40+% range. Those guys are terrifying.
I’m going to assume you play a lot of Skyhammer, as his default (the M4) is the only weapon you mention. Everything below assumes you playing M4 Skyhammer.
Winning a close-range shootout is less about accuracy (still important, gotta put lead in the other guy) and more about weapon choice. If the other guy is packing a shotgun, you’ve probably lost if they’re in close range. The M4 is a serviceable close range weapon, but doesn’t compete with the raw damage from shotguns. Your advantage is range. Don’t let them get close and they can’t fill your ass with lead.
In medium to long range, 1v1s can still come down to weapon choice, but generally favor the higher skilled player. Aim for the neck (more on this later), don’t ADS to keep your movement speed high (you can ADS if they are disengaging and about to die) and be ready to disengage if things go south. Peeking from cover also helps.
At extreme range (i.e. sniper range), it’s best to avoid almost all engagements. Don’t get me wrong, drilling a sniper from across the map is satisfying, but will likely get you killed. Make the engagement favor you. Go flanking and hit him (or her) from an angle they won’t expect.
End of Skyhammer section.
General Aiming Tips
Most of what I say here is also in this video. It’s a REALLY old (the EV is white) video ripped from a stream (thus the strange intro), but it is one of the best accuracy videos there is.
Know your weapon.
I touched on this earlier when talking about ranges, but it’s worth reiterating. Most weapons are competent at medium to long range, but some get hit pretty hard by spread and damage falloff. Get used to managing recoil and ADSing to control spread, but don’t ADS too much.
Aim for the neck.
Aiming for the neck is a good introductory habit. With automatic weapons, you’ll get a mix of bodyshots and headshots, not to mention recoil pushing your crosshair up, so if you fail to control perfectly, you’ll still dink the watermelon. Gradually start aiming for higher points on the head, until you hit the nose.
Keep good crosshair placement.
Looking at your feet doesn’t help put lead in the enemy. Hold your crosshair around the head level of where you expect enemies to appear. There is some variance among merc heights, but having your crosshair in the vicinity of them lets you initiate the fight. Starting the fight at an advantage is huge. Not to mention it’s also better to track a target than to get shot, look around to find it and get 3 shots off before dying.
General Gameplay Tips
This is all the random stuff I can think of that is EXTREMELY useful in DB that won’t necessarily win you fights, but might win you the game.
Learn to Move.
Dirty Bomb has one of the best movement systems I’ve ever experienced. For the love of God, USE IT.
You won’t always want to use it in fights, but getting into position for fights is really useful. Ever been defending on Chapel and had an Attacker show up on the MG by your spawn? This jump is how they get there.
The biggest thing to learn is longjumping. Pressing Jump and Crouch (by default Space and Ctrl or C, both are set) at the same time will throw you forwards with a lot more power than a normal jump, and is necessary for a lot of trickjumps.
If you want to practice movement, the Assault Course is perfect. This video shows some of what you can do. (Shoutouts to HoBo for being great.)
Learn the Maps.
This will let you better predict what the enemy will do, and know how to counter it. Attackers on Chapel failing to clear the area around the EV to repair? They’re probably going to head through the tunnel to their right (the bell foundry) to flank any defenders hanging around on the catwalks. Head that way to cover it and keep your team alive, or at least give them enough warning to anticipate a flank and preempt it.
Learn to Disengage and K out.
There isn’t any reason to take a fight you can’t win, unless the fight is just a distraction to keep the enemy off the objective. If you run across 3 Fraggers stocking up on ammo, get the hell out. There’s no reason to engage.
A further step is K-ing out. When downed, there’s text that says “Press K to Tap Out”, or something to that effect. This is useful when there’s a mine on your corpse and you don’t want your medic getting turned into a fine, pink mist. You can also K out when still standing. Keep an eye on the spawn timer, if you’re on low health and/or ammo and it’s about to hit a wave, you might want to resupply and get back in the fight, rather than trying to fight on and getting stuck on a 15+ second spawnwave.
Random Crap
This is for all the things I thought of while writing that are still useful to know.
Mouse Sensitivity
Sensitivity is generally measured in in/360 or cm/360. I’m an American, so I use freedom units, so that’s what I’ll using to illustrate. [I actually hate the imperial system.
This is a measure of how far you have to move your mouse to spin 360 degrees.
This site is your best friend. It will tell you so much stuff, and tell you the settings to have to get the same sensitivity in other games.
It is generally advised to have a 360 that is less than half your mousepad so that you can always do a 180. I generally advise a 6 in/360 at the lowest, and going as high as you can comfortably manage. Lower sensitivity tends to be better in FPS. (If you’re curious I use a Razer Abyssus Mirror at 3500DPI with 20 in-game sensitivity for ~1 in/360. Do as I say, not as I do. This is stupidly high, and I should probably stop.)
This guide does a great job talking about a lot of mouse related stuff, read that if you want more info.
Crosshair
Your crosshair is all personal preference, but default white is pretty bad, as explained in that guide linked above. I use a Medium Red Dot, but again, preference. Find something that works for you and stick with it.
Field of View
FoV is determines how much you can see. Dirty Bomb (and a lot of games) use Vertical FoV, which has a strange conversion. The mouse sensitivity site I linked has an input section for FoV, and will convert it to Horizontal FoV, which is a lot easier to compare. (I play on 100 VFoV, which is about 129 HFoV. That is very high. Most console shooter play at ~65 FoV, a lot of PC shooters default to ~85-90.)
That’s probably more than you could ever want. I had some spare time. Thanks for reading this wall o’ text, go get a cookie. You earned it.
Sorry it took so long to respond, I don’t look at New Players that much.
